


Came Back Like A Slow Voice

by fourthlinefic (XylophoneCat)



Series: Sid Geno Photo Challenge 2018 [1]
Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Established Relationship, Heartache, Heartbreak, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 12:55:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16018361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XylophoneCat/pseuds/fourthlinefic
Summary: “I feel bad for not missing him more. I miss him, but it’s kind of distant like over the TV or something, I don’t know.”“You’re allowed to get over it.” Taylor said, blunt as ever. “You can’t wait forever. And I don’t think he’d want you to.”The stars are full of stories, and sometimes those stories fall to Earth.





	Came Back Like A Slow Voice

**Author's Note:**

> Written for round two of the Sidgeno photo challenge
> 
> Title from David Bowie's Star Man

Sid could taste salt on the wind. It whipped around him, pulling his damp hair into manic curls, and he tugged his jacket closer, trying to keep out the worst of the chill. His hair was getting too long, falling into his eyes, but he didn't want to cut it just yet. It was a stupid thing, but if he cut it now it would feel a little like giving up.

He watched the sky as the orange sunset peeled itself back to reveal its dark underbelly and it wasn't long before the stars started to poke their silver heads through the thin blanket of cloud. Sid named the constellations quietly to himself as they formed until it was impossible to keep up. His dad would have probably managed it, and would have told him all the stories that went with them. Sid’s favourite was Cancer, the crab that Heracles kicked so hard it flew into the sky. It was such a strange thing to commemorate in stars.

But Sid was really waiting for one particular star to show up. Katos, Geno had called it, showing Sid the lines he had to trace through the sky so that he could be sure he had the right one. Sid could still feel the warmth of his hand on his wrist, the strong surety with which Geno had guided his hand through the air. He curled his fingers against his palm, trying to hold on to that warmth.

“What's it like?” Sid had asked him once. Since they had met, they made a habit of sitting on the old picnic table at the top of the hill, trading stories under the stars.

Geno had shrugged, his movements always far too fluid for so ungainly looking a body. “Katos went into supernova years ago, is not there anymore. Whole solar system is gone.”

It didn't take long for Sid to find the echoing light of that long dead star. It hovered over the crest of a distant hill, just barely touching the scrubby grass. Soon it would slip over the horizon, and Sid wouldn't see it again for a whole nine months. So he would stay out there until the cold inevitably drove him homewards. He would watch the sky, waiting for something that he wasn’t sure would ever arrive.

* * *

Taylor brought lunch with her the next day. Long gone were the days that she would knock before pushing her way into Sid’s kitchen, and sometimes Sid wished that they were a little less comfortable in their invasions of each others’ space. He did have to admit though, that she did a good job stopping him from getting caught in his own head.

“Have you tried brooding during the day?” She asked him, setting down a large paper bag on the table. “The shadows under your eyes have shadows.”

“Ha ha,” Sid said blandly. He decided he was done struggling with Neuve Chapelle and closed his laptop with a soft click. He pulled the bag towards him. Inside were two cartons of what looked like chowder, and another paper bag that he hoped held those crusty bread rolls from the bakery in town. Taylor smacked his hands away.

“Seriously, Squid.” She said, and the look in her eyes told Sid he wasn't going to get chowder until he talked. “I'm worried about you. And the only reason mum _isn't_ is because she doesn't know you were even seeing this guy.”

Sid picked at one of his laptop stickers. 'You can't scare me, my sister's a goalie!’ it shouted in bright blue capitals. It was new, and hadn't yet been subjected to the full concentration of Sid’s restless fingers. As such, its edges were mostly intact, the same of which could not be said for the rest of Sid's sticker collection. The rainbow Habs logo was the worst off, outlined with dust that had stuck to its exposed glue over the couple of years that Sid had had it.

“I'm mostly fine,” he said, running a finger up and down the blue exclamation mark. “Just kind of numb, I think. I keep expecting him to be there, and then he isn't.”

Taylor pursed her lips and gave him a long stare before giving him one of the chowder cartons. Followed by, to Sid's great gratification, a crusty bread roll. When he pulled it apart it was still warm inside, and Sid just had to tell his sister how awesome she was.

“Shut up and eat your soup.” she told him, and Sid couldn't argue with that.

* * *

He was pretty sure Taylor got it. When he had first left Canada for university down in Pennsylvania, she had said it was like having a phantom limb. There one minute, gone the next, his ghost had hung around the house for weeks after he had left.

The difference was, Taylor knew that Sid was always going to come back. One day she would turn to pull a face at him and he would be there. Sid was waiting for something that he couldn't be sure was going to happen. Waiting for a ghost.

* * *

“Hair's getting big.”

“Long.” Sid corrected absently. He was meant to be writing an article for Canada’s History, lying with his head in Geno's lap with his laptop balanced on his stomach. He'd been lying there so long, the underside of the computer was starting to get uncomfortably warm through his t-shirt, but he kept getting distracted.

His mother would have said that he was letting himself be distracted, but Geno's hands in his hair were just too good to ignore. That, and the low lights in Sid’s small sitting room and the half drunk glass of red wine on the coffee table meant that Sid was about ten minutes away from falling asleep.

“I should get it cut. Unless you like it long,” Sid added when Geno clicked in a way that Sid was beginning to realise meant he didn't like something.

“Like the feel,” he said, wrapping a dark curl loosely around his finger. “Is like sea at night, when we go see the stars.”

Sid laughed, and his laptop wobbled dangerously on its precarious perch. He reached up to catch Geno's hand and pulled it down so that he could kiss the back of his knuckles. He rubbed his thumb briefly against the weird extra joint that allowed Geno bend his wrist right the way back, before letting Geno take his hand away.

“You want to go up to the hill tonight? It’s clear skies.” He was half hoping that Geno would say no, that he was perfectly comfortable where he was, but Sid couldn’t help but feel a little selfish for it. This late in the year, Katos would only be visible for about another month and he figured that Geno would want to take any opportunity to go up and stargaze.

There was a brief pause as Geno considered the offer. Sid couldn’t tell what that pause meant, his position making it impossible to see Geno’s face and the expression on it. But his hands didn’t still in Sid’s hair, and he made no move to get up.

“Think we just stay home tonight. What you writing about?” he asked. Sid smiled and settled in to telling Geno about the impact of World War One on the relations between French and English speaking communities.

* * *

“You need a haircut, sweetie,” were the words his mother greeted him with when he went round that afternoon. She had been complaining about a leaky pipe in the bathroom, and though Sid was more comfortable with words than with toolkits, he had promised her he'd have a look at it.

“It's fine,” he said, frowning at the pipe under the sink. He'd tightened all the fixings, but it was still dripping. Maybe it was a hairline crack letting the water out?

Trina tutted, and Sid jumped and nearly cracked his head against the bottom of the sink when she suddenly thrust her hands into his hair. “Look, it's all getting in your eyes, and it'll start getting knotty if you don't look after it. You may have got the Forbes nose, but those curls are all Crosby.”

“Really, mom. It's fine.”

“It used to annoy your dad something dreadful, it getting too long that is. Sometimes he couldn't wait for the barbers, he'd hand me the kitchen scissors and tell me to do it right there on the linoleum.” 

She sighed and Sid stuck his head further under the sink. Three years and he still hated how misty eyed his mom got talking about his dad. Not that he resented her her feelings or whatever, it was just… hard to see her get sad.

“I can do it for you, if you like?”

Sid set his shoulders, stared resolutely at the pipe.

“It's okay, mom.”

* * *

Flower and Kris were good friends. The evening Geno left, they took themselves over to Sid’s with a large bottle of whisky and a long list of pre-prepared insults about Geno that Sid knew they didn’t really mean. He was touched, but they were misplaced efforts and it was amusing to watch the war of disappointment that their hard work would go unappreciated against the relief that they didn’t actually have to say anything bad about Geno.

But he still took the whisky.

“Why’d he leave?” Flower asked once they were all settled on Sid’s sofa, each with a glass in hand. Sid sat between them, like the forlorn sandwich filling between the bread of overbearing but well meaning friendship.

“Family stuff. He had to go home.” Neither Flower nor Kris knew exactly where home was for Geno. Geno had told them it was far away and very cold, and they had both assumed he meant Russia. His accent did sound vaguely Russian. 

Kris gave a tut of sympathy and topped Sid’s glass up in a mostly silent show of support.

“Did he say when he’d be back?” Flower pressed. Sid took a long burning sip of whisky before answering.

“He doesn’t know if he can.” he said. His voice caught on the words, harsh and upset, but he was blaming that on the whisky. “It just...it all just depends.”

“Sucks.” offered Kris, and Sid nodded.

It really fucking sucked.

* * *

But then it started sucking a little less.

Katos eventually slid down over the horizon, and Sid found that it didn’t hurt to breath anymore. He stopped going up the hill to look at the stars, and started going to bed at nine again. The shadows under his eyes melted away, and he found that the words for his articles came far easier to him.

Taylor said one morning that it was like watching someone wake up.

“It’s like you’ve been here, but you weren’t really here.”

They were sat at their mom’s dining table, putting together a scrapbook for one of their cousin’s weddings. There was an unconscionable amount of glitter involved, and Trina had ordered them to get the craft mat out to stop stick glue getting on the varnished wood. It was the same one Sid and Taylor had used as kids, depicting a borderline psychotic party of clowns in bright primary colours. One of the clowns had a smear of red paint over its eyes, adding to the unsettling tableau. Sid shuffled a pile of photocopied photos over its face.

“I’ve been trying-”

“Don’t you even dare apologise.” Taylor interrupted him. “We get it, it’s okay.”

Sid pasted a photo of Hannah and Tom onto a piece of gold card and then stuck that over the avalanche of glitter on the page they were working on. There had to be a point where this went from tasteful to gauche, right? Taylor didn’t seem to think so, and Sid watched with thinly veiled despair as she upended a vial of shimmering silver on a photo their mom had taken from Hannah’s Facebook.

“I feel bad for not missing him more. I miss him, but it’s kind of distant like over the TV or something, I don’t know.”

“You’re allowed to get over it.” Taylor said, blunt as ever. “You can’t wait forever. And I don’t think he’d want you to.”

Sid hummed in agreement, and stuck a silver paper heart next to Tom and Hannah on his dad’s old boat.

* * *

“I have to go.”

Sid looked over at Geno with confused eyes. At the cliff’s bottom the sea crashed against the rocks, and Sid felt suddenly as if he were in that water, everything tossing and turning around him before throwing him, battered and bruised, onto the cold winter shore.

“Go where?” he managed through numb lips.

“Home.”

Sid frowned. Geno had said that he didn’t have a home anymore, that it was all gone and he and his family were left wandering. That was, until Geno had been separated from them and left to fend for himself in the Canadian desolation. And then he’d found Sid, and Sid thought that they had found home together. He didn’t get it.

“I think maybe I found them, Sid. Radio signal is very weak, but I feel is them.” Geno looked so tentatively hopeful that Sid couldn’t even look at him. He knew he should feel happy for Geno, but he just felt cold. 

He swallowed down the bitterness welling in his throat, and pasted on his best approximation of a smile. “That’s really great, G. 

“Is off planet transport leaving north of Winnipeg next week. I am going with them.”

“You can just leave that easily? Just like that?” Sid had snapped, letting his hurt get the better of him. 

“Not so easy,” Geno said, and Sid could feel that he had withdrawn from him slightly. He felt it Geno’s guarded tone. “Been looking a long time, Sid.”

Sid sighed and scrubbed his hands over his eyes. “I know, I’m sorry. And you should go, of course you should go.”

“Could have gone earlier,” Geno said, and he sounded shy, almost apologetic. He let that pronouncement hang between them, and Sid turned to look at him in wonder.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Wanted to stay,” Geno shrugged, and Sid felt a sudden small frisson of warmth in his chest. “I love Earth, being here with you, but I need to find my family.”

 _You aren’t good enough_ , was what Sid heard underneath all that. But he closed his eyes against the sharp feeling and let Geno kiss him goodbye under the stars.

* * *

When Flower and Tanger left the next morning, both nursing spectacular headaches, Sid finally gave himself permission to cry.

* * *

Geno had first stumbled into Sid’s life when Sid nearly hit him with his car. In Sid’s defence, it was snowing, and Geno was stupidly close to the road and, thanks to the blizzard conditions, only visible at the last minute. After Sid had finished yelling at him, Sid told Geno that he should thank his lucky stars that Sid was barely doing ten miles an hour and had the sense not to slam on his breaks. And then, because he was Canadian and lived to hold up the stereotypes, he had offered Geno a lift into town where it was safer than wandering around the back roads.

“Am used to cold,” Geno had said, apparently finding himself very amusing if the crinkle eyed smile was anything to go by. Sid wouldn’t get the joke until later in their relationship, when Geno finally told him about the subzero temperatures his family had to keep their ships at in order to conserve energy. 

“Good job you landed here then,” Sid would say, pulling his knitted blanket further up against his chin. “Canada invented cold.”

But back when they first met, Sid had known nothing about Geno’s journeys through the stars. All he knew was Geno’s kind eyes, the kindness that he extended to others as easy as breathing, his loud and often obnoxious laugh. He knew that he was a little odd looking, but Sid would have never thought that it was because Geno’s ancestors had developed on a planet millions upon millions of miles away. 

All Sid knew was that after that chance meeting, Geno started turning up in town more and more. Sid would bump into him at the supermarket, at the park when he was walking Sam, even at the hockey rink. Geno had balked at first when Sid asked if he wanted to skate with himself, Flower and Tanger, but to his credit he tried. Mostly he clung to Sid’s sleeve as they lapped the rink in painstaking circles, with Tanger and Flower whizzing past shouting equal parts encouragement and chirps. But Sid didn’t mind, and besides, he sensed there was a decent stride hidden under all the wobbling.

And then Sid had kissed Geno, up on the cliffs over the sea, and the rest is history.

* * *

Sid was walking Sam along the cliffs when he realised that Katos was back in the sky. It was nearly at its zenith, staring down at Sid from almost directly above him. He had to crane his neck right the way back to see it properly.

“I miss you,” he said to the silent star, and would have stayed there longer had Sam not pressed her wet, impatient nose against his hand. “Sorry, girl.”

They set off walking again, swallowing great lungfuls of the fresh air that blew in from the sea. Sid didn’t need to worry about his hair getting tangled these days. He had finally taken his mom up on her offer when the summer heat started getting too hot to bear. It hadn’t felt as much of a betrayal as he had thought it would.

Eventually they came to a fork in the path. Sam automatically started off down the left hand fork that led back down the cliffs to the warm lights of home. But Sid’s feet wanted to go further up, up to the picnic table where you could see the stars best. And so did his heart, if he was being honest. Sam huffed with doggy annoyance at being kept from her bed, and Sid found himself apologizing to her again. “I just want to check,” he told her.

Check what? There was nothing up there but gulls this time of year. He shook his head at his own sentimentality, but carried on walking. It was stupid to go near the edge at this time of night, but Sid knew where he was going.

The picnic table was empty when he got there, just like he knew it would be. He lifted Sam onto the table before clambering up to join her. He put his back to the windswept tree, stubbornly growing where everything else had given up. Its bark was rough against the cotton of his jacket. Sam settled down next to him and put her muzzle in his lap. The fur at her neck was always thick and soft, and Sid latched his fingers into it, like an anchor.

The stars stretched dizzyingly before him, the milky way a silver streak through the sky. There was a time when Sid would have looked at those stars with wonder, and then with heartache, but now he looked at them and felt tired. He ran a hand through his hair, just starting to curl over the tops of his ears.

“I’m not waiting,” he said to the stars. They didn’t say anything back. From the corner of his eye, Sid saw movement and turned just in time to catch the tail of a shooting star. “I’m not.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on Tumblr @fourthlinefic - come say hi!


End file.
